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January 2010

When they finally got inside the house, everything was in jars and nothing was labeled. Though it is difficult to say whether or not labels would have been any help. What does one label a jar full of rulers? The jar is clear glass, the contents are as plain as day. Would a label really bring all that much clarity as to why, precisely, those rulers were put in that particular jar?

Thousands of jars, meticulously organized in an indeterminable, label-less system. It must have taken years.

Those charged with dividing the contents were at a loss.

After much debate, it seemed easier to leave things in their respective jars.

I spent a large portion of the afternoon mesmerized by the shininess of the Apple iPad. Even though it has a horrible, horrible name. For about an hour I seriously considered getting one, since we were planning on replacing our MacBook later this year anyway and we don’t use it for that much. And it seemed like it would be a good happy medium between my iPhone lust and my AT&T loathing.

And then I realized since it’s app-based I can’t really do anything useful on it and would be deprived of my beloved Scrivener. So I am going to have to ignore the shiny for now. Someone call me when it runs OS X.

In better news, I tested USPS requested package pickup today and it seems to have worked just fine, so I now have an alternative to walking to the post office in the snow when I have something larger than print envelope sized to mail.

And we are rolling toward the end of our epic LOST re-watch. Season 5 is a lot more, um, inconsistent than I’d remembered. Still good, just missing something. But I know the finale will make me cry again, so maybe I’ll forgive the inconsistencies in a few days.

Still in revisionland, of course. I’m not sure I’m going to have a finished(ish) draft by as early in February as I’d wanted, but it’s starting to look novel-shaped again, which is something. It still needs massive amounts of work but the structure is getting there and that’s making my brain hurt marginally less.

As an addendum to the Fluevog-o-rama post, the boy would like me to mention that he does not have two pairs of vogs, he has three. I forgot about his shiny dress shoes with the diamond pattern that Googling has not helped me find a link or name of the style. They’re shiny, though. I should talk him into letting me do a photo retrospective of his shoes, too.

We finished re-watching Season 4 of LOST today. The entire finale is kind of brilliant. I still love Frank. They need to make a movie out of The Hunger Games soon because Tania Raymonde needs to be Katniss. I’m excited to re-watch S5. Also, my crush on Michael Emerson is pure & true & knows no bounds.

I’m still in revisionland, which mostly consists of writing down snatches of new scenes in a notebook while breaking down my previous draft in Scrivener. It’s a mess right now, but the new version is starting to have shape, so that’s something.

I’m weirdly obsessed with antlers lately, have I mentioned that? I recently got this necklace and I rather love it. I’ve been favorite-ing actual vintage antlers on Etsy, too, but people keep buying them before I get a chance to mull over where I might put them. (I do have one random antler hanging out on one of the bookshelves in the studio already.)

I don’t think I’m going to be able to catch the A.R.T.’s production of Gatz, unfortunately, but I’m loving getting bits of The Great Gatsby via @ARTGatz on Twitter. It’s making me want to re-read the book, which I haven’t read since high school.

I’ve been trying all week to come up with something to blog about, to no avail. I’m not doing anything other than writing and making tea and while my tea is lovely and the writing is going better than I had expected it to, it’s not really anything blog-worthy. Tessa napped in the shape of a comma the other day, but of course she moved before I could get the camera so I couldn’t blog about that, either.

So yesterday I tweeted that I should just blog about my shoes, especially since I have new ones, and people (well, Liz & Rachel, who as far as I know do count as people) seemed to think that was a good idea.

So this post is all about my shoes. Specifically, all about my Fluevogs. If you have no interest in shoes or photos of shoes, I suggest you stop reading now. Though there is a kitten included in the photos, because I live with needy kittens.

Only the shoe people left and maybe some kitten fans? Good.

I have a confession to make, first, though.

I am not a shoe person.

I have never been a shoe person. I am thinking about the history of my life in shoes and can come up with nothing more than a few pairs of well-worn Doc Martens and a vague recollection that I had to wear brown shoes with my high school uniform, and I cannot recall what a single pair of those brown shoes looked like. I have never particularly cared much about my footwear.

And then a few years ago I started developing a fondness for shoes. Particularly boots, but shoes in general. I have big feet, so I never particularly cared for shoe shopping, and I can’t walk in thin or high heels so that always eliminated most of my choices. But probably due to the wonder of the internet I’ve been able to find more shoes that fit my style and my feet.

Today I will be featuring my Fluevogs, since I just got a new pair yesterday.

I discovered Fluevogs several years ago, likely via the BPAL forum, and figured I would pretty much never be able to afford them. I got one pair on clearance that the boy later inherited because they looked better on him. (No photo, they’re Angel Michaels. Just pretend the red bit is white.)

But now between gifts and savvy sale shopping I have three pairs and the boy has two.

They’re adorable and don’t seem to need much breaking in other than a teensy bit in the toes. I wanted a shoe that could be dressed up or down that didn’t have much of a heel and these seem like they’ll be perfect. No, I did not pay $239 for them. Google is my friend.

I love the Fellowship family, because of the heels. They’re big & low but but nicely streamlined, and the shoes are so fitted that they don’t look clunky.

Please excuse my rolled up jeans. I learned today that it is very difficult to take photos of your own shoes. This one was actually accomplished by aiming my camera down into my full length mirror. I flipped it in PhotoShop because the backwards “f” on the heel (that you can’t even see) was making me neurotic.

I love these boots. They are comfy and fabulous. I’d thought the buckles would annoy me but they don’t, and even if they did they’re removable.

Y’all should know by now that I’m a sucker for Victoriana, and one of my very favorite color schemes is black & white with a touch of red, so the buttons killed me and I kind of had to have these the second I saw them. I left them on after I took these photos, because I don’t have enough opportunities to wear them.

The whole Bellevue family is gorgeous, too, and the heel is actually sturdy enough for me to manage, which is brilliant because if these boots hadn’t worked on me I seriously would have cried.

And Fluevog is tormenting me now, because they tweeted a sneaky preview of these forthcoming Bellevues:

I’m kind of going to have to get those, too. I should start saving my pennies now.

At one point this past Sunday night I was standing alone in a dark room full of artfully illuminated bathtubs. One of them still had a bit of blood in it, but my attention was mostly focused on the tub half-full of water in which a live eel was swimming counter-clockwise circles around and around and around.

A man in a white mask entered from a door across the room and walked toward me. He peered in the tub to see what I was looking at, watched the eel with me for a bit, and then walked out another door, leaving me and the eel alone again.

I was at Sleep No More again, of course. How I missed the eel the first two times is beyond me, but it gives you an idea of how much there is to look at besides the actors. I’m so glad they extended the (now sold-out) run, we have tickets to go again next month before it closes. I will miss it terribly when it’s gone.

I’m in revisionland at the moment, and I’ll hopefully have something resembling a new draft by the time I get to return to Manderley again. I have new text and old text in bits and pieces and divided up into different Scrivener files at the moment, but I think it’s going well. It’s more like writing a new novel with bits of the old one in it, rather than adding new bits to the old version this time, but I think that’s likely a good thing at this point.

The realtor said they could get estimates from removal services but then there was some sort of confusion with determining ownership because of the property lines, because it spends so much time underground. And there was so much paperwork and expense involved that we figured it really wasn’t worth the effort and decided to just let it stay.

We liked the house too much to give it up over something as minor as a yard monster. Besides, it doesn’t really bother anyone. It stays in the yard. The first summer it accidentally destroyed the azaleas but I didn’t care for the azaleas anyway.